1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium. More specifically, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium which make it possible to activate electronic equipment quickly to provide enhanced usability for the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the related art, electronic equipment such as a personal computer is installed with a so-called suspend/resume function, whereby a state immediately before terminating a computer is temporarily stored so that operation can be immediately resumed when the computer is booted up again.
In particular, CE (Consumer Electronics) equipment such as a digital still camera adopts a system in which, in order to ensure that the equipment becomes operable immediately after activation, electric power is continued to be supplied to a memory such as RAM even after power OFF is commanded by the user, so that a suspend/resume is repeated without performing a shut down or reboot every time activation or termination is done.
However, when a suspend/resume is repeated, data held in a memory such as RAM may be erroneously updated, or destructed, leading to malfunction of equipment. For example, if there is a bug in an application program installed in a computer, a situation may arise in which although processing of the application program is terminated, the storage area within the memory that the application program has secured is not freed, so the available storage area within the memory decreases gradually. If this so-called memory leak occurs, a situation may arise in which, after a resume, the capacity of the memory becomes short, and so the computer does not operate properly.
To avoid such a situation, in a personal computer according to the related art, for example, by performing a shut down or reboot at the time of termination or activation, a program is loaded again to a memory such as RAM at the time when activation is performed, thereby making it possible to continue proper computer processing.
Further, there is also proposed a configuration in which, by utilizing a memory protection function that the OS has, in a single-processor system for processing multiple jobs, exclusive control is performed at the user process level safely and efficiently without any dedicated instruction (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-157132).